Re: [GZG] House rules, was Monster ships

Hm.  I suppose when I really think about this, you're right.  MT
missiles really are kind of overpowered as compared to salvos if you
only let them get hit on a 6.  The trouble is, are salvos not just
completely better (at least on damage) if you have heavy missiles get
hit the same as individual missiles in a salvo?  Sure, they might be
_smarter_ but if they never get through against even barely adequate
point defense, what's the point?  (And by my custom-brew standardss
that's loosely defined as, "you can have at least an outside chance of
surviving an unassisted strike of about 30 fighters in a 5000 NPV game,
although maybe not so much if they've got torpedo bombers".)

On another note, the house rules in my games basically go like this
(they are many, so this is long):

1.  We tend to play a series of custom one-offs, where mixing what is
considered Kra'Vak, Phalon, or human tech is perfectly fine but where
there may be story limits to what a given power might build in terms of
size of ships and how many different advanced systems are used.

2.  We allow advanced screens from Cross Dimensions for particularly
advanced powers.  (We have two of them imagined in the greater galaxy
thus far, which are not in direct contact with one another.)  Against
Kra'Vak weapons, these are treated as reducing K-gun effective class by
1 per level of screen straight up.  An effective class 0 K-gun may do
its original class damage, without chance of reroll, on a reroll of 5+
after the initial hit, or else it does no damage at all.  An effective
class -1 K-gun may do the same on a 6+.

3.  Armor reduces K-gun double damage chances by -1 per layer of armor,
similar to how Kra'Vak armor levels did so in the older game.  Nobody
has more than four layers of armor or bigger K-guns than K6's.	This is
cumulative with the reduction effect of advanced screens.  (General
sense is, the defenses as such are more expensive in many ways than the
K-guns themselves in the bite they take out of cost and ship mass, so it
doesn't really nerf K-guns too much but makes them something other than
the completely undefendable weapons they are in the base fleet books.)

4.  Point defense and fighter-to-fighter rolls will bleed over from one
fighter group to the next.  (We've always taken the view than when 400
fighters attack a single ship or fighter flotilla, groups of 6 are
meaningless.)  We are not currently doing this for salvo missiles due to
the greater difficulties to hit.

5.  All direct fire on a single ship must be resolved at the same time. 
It's just faster, and it also prevents people from experimentally
probing a ship's defenses (i.e. whether they are putting up a reflex
field) and minimizing the damage.  With particularly large piles of die
rolls we allow subdividing by 2 or 4 and multiplying the totals.

6.  Point defense is not allowed to identify and decide which groups of
fighters it wishes to prioritize when firing -- fighter strike ECM is
considered good enough that regular fighters may be used as decoys for
more powerful bombers, so long as the regular fighters actually have a
ship strike capability.  (We haven't allowed interceptors to play as
soaks in this fashion.)  Fighter-to-fighter attacks _are_ allowed to do
this, if someone's stupid enough to actually let bombers in range of
other fighters while any of their own standard fighters or interceptors
are still alive.

7.  Scatterguns miss completely on a natural 1.  If they're being used
in an area defense role, they still do friendly fire damage to the other
ship.

8.  We allow a point defense missile rack, envisioned loosely as a
bomb-pumped laser, that has a mass of 1, cost 4, and does the same
damage as four PDS systems all firing at once, but may only fire once
before it is expended.	Area defense fire controls are required the same
way as PDS does (i.e. they do not get the auto-area defense ability of
scatterguns).

9.  Ship to ship beam and K-gun weapons may attack a fighter group
within 12 MU and hit it on a 6; if the fighter group spends an endurance
to evade, the fire is useless.

10.  For +1 NPV cost per fighter, a fighter group may be equipped as an
artillery spotter.  Instead of attacking another ship within 12 MU
directly, it may give a +1 bonus to all fire from its mother ship, and
allow salvo missiles, antimatter torpedoes, or plasma from its mother
ship to have a secondary move of 6 MU similar to how fighters would be
allowed to go.	The other ship may not engage the fighter with point
defense, but may use ship-to-ship weapons against it.  If the spotter
evades, it may not spot in that turn.  Spotter bonuses do not allow a
ship to automatically hit (i.e. reducing a 2+ roll on a torpedo or K-gun
to 1+), and do not allow a missile or plasma bolt to exceed its normal
range.	The general idea of this, besides modeling something like an
Iowa BB from wet navy years that had such gunnery spotters, is twofold: 
to allow a fleet book style dreadnought (i.e. primarily a warship with
only a couple or three fighters) to have an actual use for its fighters
a
 gainst similarly sized battleships (i.e. all guns and no fighters) that
have too much point defense to effectively attack, and to allow placed
ordnance to actually have a shot at hitting high powered advanced thrust
vessels.

11.  Swing role fighters as per Cross Dimensions are allowed, although
they're considered an advanced form of fighter and as such are not
common.  Heavy and fast modifications are taken as base modifications to
the overall fighter that are costed only once.	At present, IJN style
"multi role" fighters are not allowed.

12.  Spinal mount weapons are considered front-arc weapons.

13.  Cloaking devices are allowed.  Cloaked ships may not be targeted by
missiles or fighters, nor may they fire them.  They may not use or
charge spinal mount weapons in any turn in which they are cloaked,
cloaking or decloaking.  A ship's cloak typically takes effect at the
end of ordnance placement.  A ship's decloak may take place at the end
of movement, or prior to movement in order to fire its own missiles, but
if it takes place prior, the ship gives warning to the enemy that it may
be about to be fired on by a decloaking ship and the enemy ship is
allowed to account for this in making its movement orders.  A ship that
decloaks after movement may not use its own placed ordnance nor dispatch
its fighters.  As with FT2, the length of time for a cloaked ship to
remain cloaked and all of its movement orders must be plotted in
advance.  A cloaked formation _may_ enter the board under cloak, but its
initial placement and formation must be decided upon in advance and all
of it
 s first several turns of movement plotted as such.  They _are_ allowed
to know the speed and distance of enemy ships at the beginning of the
game in this case prior to writing these orders.  The PSB for this is
that there are two levels of cloak: (a)  a "strategic" cloak where they
are invisible to long range sensors but are visible within combat
ranges, but they retain their ability to use their own long range
sensors to detect an enemy fleet and therefore try to at start to
maneuver into tactical range and strike against it.  (b) a "tactical"
cloak where they are invisible to all sensors but are unable to tell
where the enemy is or what course changes they make.  The range at which
a ship must go to "tactical" cloak or become visible is loosely (and
conveniently) judged to be the length of the board at the start of the
battle.

14.  We used fixed tables approximately 80-100 MU by about 60-80 MU. 
Hence, very long beam ranges are generally not used because they don't
do a whole lot of good.

15.  We have three speeds of fighters:	fast (+1 NPV per fighter, 36 MU
base movement), standard (regular cost, 24MU), or slow (-1 NPV per
fighter, 18 MU).  These speeds also affect the dogfighting capabilities
of the fighter.  (a)  Equal speeds of fighters, when engaged in
dogfights, may not escape them without giving up a free shot to the
enemy fighters.  (b)  A faster grade of fighter may evade a dogfight
against a slower one without giving up the free shot.  The slower grade
of fighter may not evade the dogfight at all.  (c)  If the fastest (+1
NPV) grade of fighters engages the slowest (-1 NPV), then not only may
the slowest not escape, but they must give up a first shot against the
fastest and then can only retaliate with whatever survives.  (i.e. the
slowest fighters are going to be cheaper, but they're going to have a
serious vulnerability in dogfights, and hence should only be deployed as
dedicated bombers that aren't designed to engage in dogfights at all, or
as the
  standard but vastly inferior fighters of a power that is simply behind
or cutting too many corners in their fighter tech.)

I think that's the lot of it.  I've been playing for a good decade or
more (and off and on babbling on the list for most of that, both under
my real name and as "Stilt Man"), and all of these rules have generally
been tweaked as time goes on both to make the game more interesting,
balance out pieces of it, and give us more variety in modelling all
sorts of different interstellar powers that may be (and frequently are)
invented on the fly to model a fairly vast galaxy of different star
nations in constant turmoil.  The storylines and ship designs have
evolved a lot of different ways, with a lot of different tactics that
have proven useful -- and advances in different nations' ships are
generally by way of doctrine within the weapons available to them rather
than being given new weapons very often.

It's been a fun ride with this game, and I don't really want it to end
particularly soon.

E

-----Original Message-----
>From: Oerjan Ariander <orjan.ariander1@comhem.se>
>Sent: Jan 14, 2010 10:40 AM
>To: gzg-l@mail.csua.berkeley.edu
>Subject: Re: [GZG] Monster ships
>
>Charles Lee wrote:
>
>>>Also note that an MTM is only about as big as a Full Thrust 
>>>fighter, which is destroyed by PDS on a 4+. The missile itself is 
>>>not Mass 2; a fair bit of that Mass is the missile hardpoint 
>>>mounted on the ship. For a comparison, look at the Mass 4 SMR where 
>>>we know that the missile salvo itself is only Mass 2 (since that's 
>>>how big an SML reload using identical missiles is) - leaving 2 
>>>Mass, ie. 50% of the system's total Mass, for the rack part of 
>>>the	salvo missile rack.
>>
>>That Mass four is a reloadable system. MT is only ons shot rack 
>>unless you use one persons idea.
>
>No, the Mass 4 SMR (Salvo Missile Rack) is just as single-shot as an 
>MTM. The reloadable version is the Salvo Missile Launcher+Magazine 
>combo, which is Mass *5* for a single shot (3 for the launcher, 2 for 
>a single standard-range salvo).
>
>Regards,
>
>Oerjan 
>
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